Behind the Scenes With the President

In “Going the Distance,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, David Remnick writes about the complexities of President Obama’s second term. The President agreed to sit for our staff photographer, Pari Dukovic, at the White House, for a portrait to accompany the article.

Dukovic learned the location of the shoot a day in advance: the Diplomatic Reception Room, in the East Wing, where foreign ambassadors and visiting heads of state are often greeted. The most striking feature of the oval parlor, a former furnace room, is the “Vue de l’Amérique du Nord,” a panoramic wallpaper illustrating thirty-two scenes from American history: steamboats in the spray of Niagara Falls, merchant ships unloading in Boston Harbor, and horse-drawn carriages traversing New York’s Palisades, along with, throughout, the intermingling of a white, black, and Native American populace. The wallpaper was produced, in 1834, by Zuber & Cie, a French company that still manufactures block-printed wallpaper and upholstery fabric; it was installed in the Diplomatic Room during John F. Kennedy’s Presidency. (Jacqueline Kennedy salvaged several panels of the wallpaper from a Federal-period house in Maryland that was demolished to make way for a grocery store.)

For a photographer, the gift of such wallpaper as a portrait backdrop could not be ignored. Dukovic, who is often inspired by paintings when planning his shoots, told me that the “Vue de l’Amérique du Nord” reminded him of Roman frescoes. “The wallpaper is a French interpretation of America,” he said. “As a European myself, its history fascinated me. Though the Oval Office has been the setting for so many historical Presidential portraits, to be in the Diplomatic Room felt, to me, like a stroke of luck.”

On a Tuesday morning this month, in the midst of the polar vortex, Dukovic, two assistants, and I drove up to the White House, past the South Lawn, and entered an entirely different vortex: the swirl of “Presidential propinquity” that Remnick describes in his article. Inside the Diplomatic Room, we found mahogany furniture, crystal sconces, and the hearth where Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his fireside chats; we were immediately taken by the vivid color and pictorial tropes of the Zuber wallpaper.

Pete Souza, the chief White House photographer, greeted us while we set up for the shoot. Souza, who has probably had more access to a sitting President than any other photographer in history, talked about the importance of speed when photographing Obama, who White House staff members describe as “a point-and-shoot man.” As Remnick notes, “Obama has learned what works for him in pictures: a broad, toothy smile. A millisecond after the flash, the sash releases, the smile drops, a curtain falling.” Souza himself began shooting when the President arrived; he documented the entire sitting with a digital camera.

For the final portrait, which Dukovic shot on film, the President stood in front of a tableau titled “Military Review at West Point,” a section of the wallpaper that shows cadets parading along the Hudson River under the gaze of local gentility. In Dukovic’s picture, Obama is framed by the green Catskill Mountains. We had travelled to Washington, but we found a bit of New York in the White House.

Top two photographs by Pete Souza/Official White House Photos. Bottom photograph by Pari Dukovic